The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman’s Crystals: Difference between revisions

Norman always fostered developing writers. According to Schiller, Nor- man wrote 50,000 letters in his life, with maybe 8,000 to writers of all ages: “Norman responded, and that impressed me. At the end, a nurse sat on his bedside and asked, ‘Do you think you could teach me how to write?’ Norman was reading the New York Times. He lowered the paper and asked, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ She was going sailing with her boyfriend. A week later, I’m back to visit and Norman is editing her manuscript, making comments. He handed her four pages, all marked up. He went back to reading the Times. She read the manuscript over and over and she started to cry. That’s where the Norman Mailer Writers Colony was born. When I saw this happen in the hospital, I saw something needed to be done. Now I knew I had to make time and devote part of my life to this cause. I went to Norris and Norman’s children. I reached out to many others in many directions to develop a program that is as unique and different as Norman was work on the edge.”

It is fitting that this award is first given to a novelist, since it was as a nov- elist that Norman defined himself, despite the attention he received for his invention of a novelistic kind of nonfiction. The truth is Norman believed that history itself was the fiction of a writer; yet he kept a laser-like line of respect for the way the novel could exceed the gravitational pull of histori- cal fact, however brilliantly interpreted by the astute reporter he was. Nor- man once said to Schiller, “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” Schiller retorted, “And three times an historian,” which made Mailer fall silent. The two bantered; sometimes they quarreled; once they did not speak to each other for a year. Then Norman called Larry: “If I knew I had to kiss your ass, I wouldn’t have shaved.” To which Larry, imp that he is, replied “Hello, lover.”

Schiller’s relationship with Mailer began in 1972 when the photographer asked the author to write a 12,000-word introduction to a proposed book of his photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Norman surprised Schiller with ten times the word length he’d requested. Mailer was inspired by Schiller’s idea of writing about Marilyn, perhaps because he was developing an ideal woman as a counterpart to his exploration into what makes a man macho.

 

“Elegance” became the defining attribute of a woman’s essence. Schiller also possessed extraordinary interview and research skills, especially for book length projects, where he can amass forty hours of interviews with a single subject. Schiller is able to mine details that the subject had forgotten were buried. Cops and KGB operatives fall under Schiller’s spell of giving up everything to history. Mailer learned from Schiller and Schiller learned from Mailer. These lessons are worth a future book enacting a series of creative collaborations functioning at the highest level.

I had attended several sessions when I met with Larry for a lunch. Schiller said,“The workshops, to my surprise, have really worked well.”Next year he will enlarge the summer programs with additional weeklong sessions: one on the art of interviewing, one on what agents know and writers need to know, and another on how writers and photographers collaborate. The future is concurrent with the present, in Schiller’s Mailer existentialism, and I am apprised of forthcoming surprises fellows. Don DeLillo will show up sometime this summer on an unexpected weekday, joining the Mailerlows. DeLillo will get up to speed with the group, have lunch, go fishing, and then have some brilliant things to say the next day at breakfast. Schiller intends to spring a series of these spontaneous interruptions, calling them “Conversations with the Fellows.”

Embossed on a brass plaque beside the entrance to the edifice.

The Norman Mailer Writers Colony Established 2008